The strategic anti-Naxal operations command headquarters of the Central Reserve Police Force has been shifted from Kolkata to the heart of the Naxal violence-hit Chhattisgarh after 37 jawans of the paramilitary force were killed by Maoists in less than two months.
In a May 4 order, the CRPF directed the “immediate” transfer of the central zone command headquarters, roughly seven years after it was shifted from Raipur to Kolkata because of “logistics and connectivity issues”.
The new CRPF Director-General Rajeev Rai Bhatnagar has been asked to ensure that the command starts working from Raipur before the high-level meeting of Left Wing Extremism-hit States here on Monday.
Kuldiep Singh, Additional Director-General of the CRPF central zone, was air-dashed to Raipur from Kolkata, and he took charge of the command on Friday, sources said.
Raised on August 7, 2009, the central zone was tasked with overseeing troops deployment across the States affected by Left Wing Extremism such as West Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. It was moved to Kolkata in July 2010 for want of better rail and air links for the command office, days after the Maoists killed 75 CRPF jawans and a Chhattisgarh policeman in Dantewada on April 6.
Review meet
Top sources in the security establishment said the Union Home Ministry, after reviewing the April 24 ambush in Sukma district that killed 25 jawans, ordered the CRPF to immediately shift the central zone command to Raipur, without even bothering about the logistics to be put in place.
The sources said Mr. Bhatnagar himself oversaw the quick activation of the command in Raipur after attending a meeting of the Unified Command on LWE on May 5, chaired by Chief Minister Raman Singh. He later went to Sukma to make an assessment of the ambush site near Burkapal and held a ‘sainik sammelan’ (a troops meeting) to boost the morale of the jawans at a camp in the forests in south Bastar, a few km from the State’s border with Odisha, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.
“Over the past two days, the new DG has travelled to the interiors of Sukma and Dantewada, the worst-affected districts. He also visited the ambush site at Bheji in Sukma,” an officer said.
